Leonard A. Lauder - The Company I Keep

With my mother, Este Lauder, c. 1934

The Este Lauder Companies Archives

M y mother wasnt like other mothers.

When I was growing up in the 1930s, I remember sitting in the kitchen, watching my mother cook up facial creams on the stove. We lived in a series of residential hotels on New Yorks Upper West Side. These were ordinary apartment buildings with one difference: the building provided maid service. My mother liked the convenience of not having to make the beds.

Even then, her focus was on her business.

Id come home from elementary school to a home-cooked hot lunch. (Lamb chops with mint jelly and mashed potatoes is still my favorite meal.) Then the doorbell would ring with a customer: women who wanted to learn how to use the velvety, sweet-smelling potions that made their face feel as smooth and supple as fine silk. While I kept busy in the living room, my mother gave them facials in the bedroom. I often heard her encouraging them to care for their skin with what became her signature phrase: Every woman can be beautiful.

And it was true: when the women walked through the living room after their treatments, their skin glowed. And their purses often held a few newly purchased black-and-white containers labeled Este Lauder.

I was born in 1933, the same year that my mother founded what would become The Este Lauder Companies. Today, the company that bears her name comprises over 25 brands sold in some 150 countries and territories. Back then, though, success was measured in individual jars. The company and I grew up together, our lives as closely paired as twins. It has always been more than a family company: it wasand continues to bemy family.

This is our story. Its the story of a familys transformation, of a companys creation, of a changing world, and of my own personal journey as I learned to navigate through life, love, and Este Lauder.

Creating beauty was something my mother had been doing ever since she was a young child.

The woman who would become Este Lauder was born on July 1, 1908, as Josephine Esther Mentzer, the daughter of Rose Schotz Rosenthal and her second husband, Max Mentzer. Rose had emigrated from Hungary and Max from Slovakia; both ended up in Corona, Queens, where Max ran a hardware store and they lived above the shop.

That part of Queens then was a loud and lively place, crowded with a rapidly growing population of Italian, Eastern European, German, and Irish immigrants and noisy with ongoing construction. It was in a constant state of flux, with new industries and roads springing up in the wake of the 1909 completion of the Queensboro Bridge. The Brooklyn Ash Company and other businesses used the marshland adjoining Flushing Bay to dispose of cinders and garbage from nearby boroughs. Heaps of refuse piled up more than sixty feet high and were referred to as Corona Mountain.

But it was also pulsing with vitality and purpose. All of those immigrants had come to the United States to make a better life for themselves and their children, and they were pouring their energies into that goal. Their children, born in America, tended to shun their straitlaced European backgrounds and threw themselves into assimilating. My mother later wrote in her autobiography, Este: A Success Story, I wanted desperately to be 100 percent American. That meant learning to speak unaccented English and to spot and seize the opportunities that would enable her to leave Queens and explore a wider world.

Like many little girls, Esty, as her family called her, liked to play with her mothers skin creams and comb her girlfriends hair. But her interest in beauty makeovers went far beyond most little girls experiments. Family, friends, and later classmatesanyone who sat down long enoughwas subject to one of her treatments, to the point that Max expostulated, Esty, stop fiddling with other peoples faces.

After school and on weekends, Esty helped out at her fathers hardware store. Her special job was creating the window displays that would attract customers. For the Christmas holiday season, she would decorate a hammer or a set of nails with extravagant bows and gift wrap, then place it under an artificial tree. Customers responded, and she learned an important lesson. Packaging required special thought, she would write. You could make a thing wonderful by its outward appearance. There may be a big difference between lipstick and dry goods, between fragrance and doorknobs, but just about everything has to be sold aggressively.

She also helped at another family business, a neighborhood department store run by Fanny Rosenthal (the wife of Estys older half brother, Isidor Rosenthal) and Fannys sister, Frieda Plafker. Plafker & Rosenthal was, my mother remembered, my gateway to fancy. It was Dress-Up Land for me. I loved to play with the beautiful clothes, touch the smooth leather gloves, pull the lace scarves around my shoulders. (As a little boy, I used to play hide-and-seek with my cousins in the shoe storeroom in the back.)

It was also an education in salesmanship. Like most department stores at the time, Plafker & Rosenthal was predominantly a womans world. Women came as much for the fun of ogling the goods and the thrill of buying them as to meet with their friends in a comfortable setting that was a combination of emporium, playground, and sorority clubhouse. At Plafker & Rosenthal, female customers were waited on by saleswomen who literally spoke their language; Fanny and Frieda could chat in Yiddish with Jewish shoppers and rattle off idiomatic Neapolitan to their Italian clientele. They kept the store open six and a half days a week and stocked it with everything from menorahs to Communion dresses.